lete. This endowment implies a
mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of
thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the
writer exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuine
correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by
discipline. In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish and
proportion. Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thought
and its worded envelope to warm convexity. Only he has the fine tact
and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. The
best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it
shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and
plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says that
only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a
thing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art,
and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art must
unite genial gifts with conscientious culture.

Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verse
of the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agile
intellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a master
in style but through kindred endowment. The compact, symmetrical
combination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demanded
for the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need not
have; but his perceptions must be brightened by the light
whose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form,
deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with that
fragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful.

IV.

DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS.[5]

[5] Putnam's Magazine, 1868.

"Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic." So said
Charles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring class.
Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only as
evidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in the
epopee. The term "machinery" implies ignorance of the import of the
super-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialism
and a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could write
an epic, with or without the "machinery." Such acceptance would
betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want
of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.

A genuine epic,